Mammography is a proven way of detecting breast cancer at an early stage. Various feature extraction techniques such as histograms, co-occurrence matrix, local binary patterns, Gabor filters, wavelet transforms are used for analysing mammograms. The novel pixel N-gram feature extraction technique has been inspired from the character N-gram concept of text retrieval. In this paper, we have compared the novel N-gram feature extraction technique with the co-occurrence matrix feature extraction technique. The experiments were conducted on the benchmark miniMIAS mammography database. Classification of mammograms into normal and abnormal category using N-gram features showed promising results with greater classification accuracy, sensitivity and specificity compared to classification using co-occurrence matrix features. Moreover, N-gram features computation are found to be considerably faster than co-occurrence matrix feature computation